Whatever your business may be, it is important to note that your Web site is part of your brand, and there are unfortunately cybercriminals out there who will try to ride on your brand's coattails and pick up business from unsuspecting, potential customers. Online, the broad spectrum of brandjacking covers activities like bidding on a brand's keyword within a search platform, using a brand's logo to deceive site visitors, and even registering a domain name close to the targeted brand's in hopes consumers will type the wrong URL. The latter is referred to as cybersquatting, and is among the more difficult to remedy, and can cause harm to your brand when consumers fall prey, then come to your Web site to make good on the situation.
Any brand can fall prey to cybersquatting and other forms of brandjacking say the experts. Thus it is prudent to safeguard your brand in advance of such attacks. The best defense is to put together a brand protection strategy for your company, and the first step should be to prevent abuse from occurring by registering domains defensively. If you're doing business overseas, make sure you register your most valuable domains and brands in the countries in which you are doing business.
And don’t be afraid to buy URLs that might not be among those you’d ever want to actually see. You may want to register popular variants like 'acmecustomerserivce.com' or acmeproducts.com.' But it is better you have these locked up than to let someone else run wild with them. Likewise, use your Web logs and Web analytics to help you identify the most popular terms that your customers are using online to find you and consider registering those terms to protect your traffic from brandjackers.
Google and other companies that operate sponsored links networks have rules against trademark abuse and can be helpful. While they can't monitor the sponsored links bided on through their system, they will take down any that infringe on trademarks, once notified.
The use of logos and other copyrighted materials is also a problem. Watermarking images, and having computer programs crawl the Web and detect such violations can go a long way toward protecting your brand.
Another simple measure that experts recommend is to use notification services like Google Alerts to see how your name is being used. This is often referred to as a vanity search, and through most notification services it's free, and effective. Plus sometimes you learn of the good ways people are talking about your brand.